ENGLISH AND AM-LIT. IN THE ELECTRONIC WORLD

College study of English and American literature is such a
basic part of our Liberal Arts tradition, that we might easily accept it
as it stands and not inquire further about its aims and methods. But there
are problems, which I would like to summarize briefly as follows:

a) Most of what is being intensively "studied"
originally appeared on the book publishing market as pleasure reading of
one sort or another. People bought and read copies of Sterne, Dickens,
Faulkner and Steinbeck because they enjoyed reading, not because they
wanted to study them. The college study of books shifts the emphasis and
changes the meaning of Literature, it even re-orients the way we think about
literature.

b) The study of Literature is basically
"commentative", s it talks about the nuances of meaning, about plot
development and about subjective reactions to what is read. In a typical
literature course, this gives students a good chance to develop their
conversational skills around the seminar table, and these are skills which
will be useful later in life without question. The teacher can merely
"host" the discussion and often prefers to let the students take the lead
in discussion. Some students might even wonder if the teacher is needed
there at all, he or she is so quiet and unobtrusive at times.

c) Serious study implies tools, techniques and
analytical skills, as we see used in the Social Science and in the Physical Sciences.
So the study of science is
intrinsically very different from the nature of literary studies. This is not entirely
because of the difference of the material being studied, but it can be, I
suggest, a difference in both approach and technique. Literary studies tend to
be initally commentative, drawing collaterial material from a wide range of
information, but they do not have a basic analytical structure and hence can be
essentially "techniqueless".

Now the question is whether
Literary Studies can change and develop in a fast-changing global scene,
or whether they are lock-stepped into an outmoded Liberal Arts system of
education. I have discussed this in an essay on the Liberal Arts in more detail than I can
outline here. There are many ways of developing literary studies to
bring them into line with the kind of work being done in other sectors of
Academe, of which I note these:

1) Use of
globally available Internet resources for bringing together all pertinent
information bearing on the literary topic at hand. For example, in the
case of Faulkner, there is a wide range of social, geographical,
historical, photographic and linguistic material available which bears on
Faulkner's world. Some of this is in printed books, much background
material can be dredged up through serious work with electronic searching,
and this kind of study-in-depth can begin to assemble "tools of technique"
which should be the ancillary core of literary analysis. Discussion must
follow the assembling of ground materials, you cannot not discuss literature
intelligently merely on the basis of reading the book and talking out the
storyline. Many college classes survive on a thin gruel of this sort with
undernourished personal and commentative returns on the reading.

2) Students majoring in college in
English and American literature find themselves in a terrible situation
after graduation, since in the new technological and competitive society we
find little use e for finely tuned literary
sensibilities at the present tim. But a student trained in deep research techniques,
well practiced in searching out and evaluating electronically available
materials, will have along with his literary skills a working sense of
the research and communication methods now widely used. This may not
qualify for a job later, but it opens the way to learning how to qualify, rather
than throwing up hands in despair.

3) Pressing
this one stage further, the new style of modern Literary Student I am describing, who is
familiar with the current electronic world and has used it in college
study beyond word-processing a paper, can produce studies as part of the
course assignments which verge into HyperMedia, an area which has been
growing within the realm of Literature. This means mastering new techniques and new
ways of thinking in writing a student paper, and opens the doors of the
mind to many possibilities. This enlarging of the mind is of course
what education is all about.

&4) nbsp; Now the new style
literary student can process the papers and written work from his
courses into a personal academic WebPage which summarizes all the thinking
and stages of development done in the college sequence. Work rewritten
into a final form should become part of the student's ultimate personal "dossier", a
record of the curve of learning and exploration, and this on a single CD
ROM has a coherence and a value which piles of marked up student papers
will never have. Reviewing where you have come from and where you are now
standing should be invaluable to the college graduate, not as a memory of seminars
and discussion and professors in the receding distance, but as one's own
documentation registering the kind of mature thinking person who one has has become.

5)
Then there is the matter of going into the "microstructure" of literature and the
art of
writing, often largely ignored in favor of Theme and Storyline which
are easy to discuss in class.. This is too large a subject to outline
here, since it addresses the matter of detailed study of text down to the
level of paragraph structure, the phrase and the word-constructs at ground
level. In music this would be the analysis and discussion of a Mozart symphony
ranging from the pitch and instrumentation as forming sequences
which consolidate into motifs and structural blocks ---- and only then on to the
overall form. But without attention to the sounds as sounds, the
orchestration and harmony functions, and the "small constructions" on the
score-page, you would miss the essential and basic sense of the music as
music. It is exactly so with written text. Especially when dealing with
literature as art-writing, we need to devote great attention to this micro-structure, and
this will entail linguistic analysis, the study of stylistics and of course great attention paid to
the phonetic sound of words and phrases, since language is basically an oral
and Sound-based phenomenon. We have often thought of
Literature as the business of the printed word, and some poetry has become silent
paper-poetry. Attention to the Microstructure reclaims Sound and reminds us
that Literature is a part of the activity of Human Speech. I do find it
strange that we should have to be reminded about something so basic!

6) As individual students assemble large batches
of information in a modified new-style
literature course, their cumulative and common work must be put into some
sort of accessible form to make sense and to be usable in the future. By
tying together all parts of a course's inputs into a well designed Internet accessible .html
document, the course can generate a serious and permanent "Academic Paper on.... " with a
special kind of double identity. For the students this can be a record of the group's activity
and results, and they should possess a CD copy for off-line browsing as part
of their personal library. But this material can also be available online
through the Internet for other other people in courses at other places, and this
can be a valuable asset
for students who do not have to begin their research at ground-zero.
Global linking of information, which is such an important part of the
scientific and economic world today, should also be a part of the academic study of
Literature

In short: A new approach to Literature involving the
modern range of tools and techniques for exploration, with a sense of the
widest possible range for each finite matter under the microscope, can
bring the study of Literature into range with a range of "hard" college
disciplines which develop specialized methods and techniques for handling data.
This should open new windows for a wider vista in the viewing of the literary art,
and incidentally match better with what is going on in the actively developing
"real" world beyond the gates of Academe.